Language Guide

CHAPTER 4

Commands

96 Command Deﬁnitions

The counting in this example requires several steps, beginning with the

reference to the outermost container. The reference paragraphs 2 thru 3

speciﬁes a list of two items, each of which is a paragraph:

{"This is paragraph two.", "This is paragraph three."}

On the basis of this list, the Scriptable Text Editor evaluates the reference

words of paragraphs 2 thru 3 as a list of two items, each of which is

a list of the words in one paragraph:

{{"This", "is", "paragraph", "two."}, ¬

"This, "is","paragraph", "three."}}

Finally, the Scriptable Text Editor counts the items in each list and returns a list

of two items, each of which speciﬁes the number of words in one paragraph:

{4, 4}.

References to nested containers are always evaluated before counting takes

place, beginning with the outermost container. Here’s another example:

tell document "simple" of app "Scriptable Text Editor"

count characters of words of paragraphs 2 thru 3

end tell

--result: {{4, 2, 9, 3}, {4, 2, 9, 5}}

The previous example demonstrated that the reference words of

paragraphs 2 thru 3 specifies a list of two items, each of which is a

list of the words in one paragraph:

{{"This", "is", "paragraph", "two."}, ¬

{"This, "is","paragraph", "three."}}

The Scriptable Text Editor counts the items in each list and returns a list of two

items, each of which is a list of the number of characters in each of the words in

one paragraph:

{{4, 2, 9, 3}, {4, 2, 9, 5}}